Weekly Update #184: Website Updates

If you’re following my private Twitter account, you might have already noticed, but today I spent a lot of time on updating our site, so… Let’s talk about that a little!

First of all, I have updated the GENBA no Kizuna section. You can now check out the updated character introductions for our four playable main characters as well as their supervisor.

If you compare them to the very first versions I’ve posted last June, you’ll notice a couple of subtle differences. The background now features the “grid” pattern used throughout the in-game menus and the age is now stated for September rather than June. Consequently, Shinketsu has become a year older since the last time, haha.

The reason for that is pretty simple. One might reckon it originally said June because that’s the month when I posted them, but that didn’t have anything to do with it. The story itself was originally supposed to take place in June but has now been pushed back to September. There is, of course, a very good reason for that, but I can’t really get into it due to spoilers. All I’m going to say is that it has something to do with the last two remaining characters in GENBA, which haven’t been unveiled yet.

Now, a more drastic age-related change has happened to Rei. She’s suddenly three years older. That’s a result from when I worked on the character profiles a little while ago. I raised her age because I wanted her to have studied at a university after high school (unlike Keiichi and Himatsu), so I needed to add a few more years.

There are also a few very subtle changes to the sprites themselves, but I doubt anyone but me would notice, lol

So yeah, that’s one big thing I did. You might also notice that there’s already a “Demo” section, but as of right now, it only says “Available soon!”.

Other than that, I naturally changed the design of the GENBA page itself, which is what really took me the most amount of time. It’s been a while since I’ve last worked on the site to this degree, so I had to look up a few things again. I mean, in the end, the result is a simple change in colors, but dang… just accomplishing that sure took a while.

There are no sliders or check boxes or anything. I had to change the code for every tiny thing myself, from a drop down button’s hover state color to the color of 1-pixel-sized bars above the menu or header. Literally everything had to be adjusted separately and I constantly had to remind myself to add the line to change it just for the GENBA page and not the entire site, haha… “orz

I feel like I’ve learned quite a lot today, however, and made sure to thoroughly document everything, so once I update the WWH page, it should go much faster and smoother.

Since I was already at it, I also finally added a gallery to the site. As of right now, it only serves as a collection of all the seasonal/ monthly artwork we have done since last summer, but I’ll add older artwork and some other things there soon as well.

All of this website stuff is still a work-in-progress, of course. I’m gonna have to adjust a few more things, but I’m rather satisfied with what I’ve accomplished so far. Of course, the next major update will be on the day the demo will be publicly released!

Speaking of the demo, it’s really all up to Natsu now. I finished a few more things for it over this last week, including a new sprite for Keiichi even, but all that’s left now is to finish the coding. So, while Natsu is going to take care of that, I’ll continue working on the website and prepare everything else for the release (like forum posts, etc).

That’s about it, I guess. If you’re curious to see two new characters for Withering Without Hope, though, you could head over to our Patreon page. I’ve made a little post there as well a couple of days ago.

Anyway, time to get back to work, so please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care! :3